[0:00] She started singing about how God had left the 99 for the one, and I just knew that I was the one. God says in Deuteronomy and in Jeremiah that if we seek Him with all our heart that we will find Him, and I found God, and He completely changed me.

[0:18] Jesus saved my life, and He made me whole. I’m Karen Carabedian. I was raised in a secular Jewish home.

[0:28] My father is Israeli. My mom is American. Our home was full of tradition.

[0:35] My mom had mitzvahs on all the doorways. She kept a kosher kitchen. We celebrated all the holidays, and my mom would light the Shabbat candles every Friday night, but we never did anything to actually live out Shabbat.

[0:52] We occasionally went to synagogue, but it was more about the tradition and the ritual than the practice of the Sabbath. I remember as a child and as a teen asking my mom, “Why do we do this?” She never really had answers for me.

[1:10] She just repeated back some things that the rabbis had told her. Because the answers were unsatisfactory to me, I started rejecting Judaism and being a Jew. I was searching for meaning and purpose in my life and searching for spirituality.

[1:26] So I tried smoking pot a few times, and nothing really happened. And I remember being at a party. A few of us went outside, and we were smoking pot together.

[1:36] And then it hit me that something had changed. Something was different. I was actually very frightened because I remember my hands were shaking.

[1:44] My body was shaking, but it wasn’t enough to stop me because I had accomplished what I was seeking, which was to just get out of my head and into a spiritual world, which drugs definitely do. At that time also, I was a heavy drinker.

[1:58] I was going to parties, again, just trying to get out of the physical and into the spiritual. And another way that I found was effective was promiscuity. I was exposed to the New Age, which is a blend of Eastern religion, Eastern mysticism.

[2:17] And I was literally bowing down to idols and worshiping spirits. And it was so satisfying spiritually that I found that I didn’t eat drugs and alcohol anymore. And I ended up finally in my late 30s in Austin, Texas.

[2:37] I was homeless, literally broke financially and broken. I had nothing so I had to barter for a room. I put an ad online saying that I could offer healthy cooking and clean up the kitchen and do the dishes three times a day in exchange for a room.

[2:59] So someone answered my ad and said it was exactly what he was looking for because he had a health issue. And I just couldn’t believe that I was in my late 30s and this is what my life was. I had been in and out of relationships, in and out of jobs.

[3:16] My life was just completely unstable and all my soul knew to do was to fall on my knees and cry out to God. I was literally sobbing and asking God for help. It was the first time ever that I spoke to God and I asked for three things.

[3:38] One was a stable life, one was to get married and remain married and one was for work that I love. So I prayed one time and that was it. Shortly after that I ended up reconciling with a boyfriend from my past and we moved in together in Boston and then within a few months I found out I was pregnant.

[4:03] Many women would be thrilled to find out they were pregnant but I was distraught. So the first thing that came to my mind was abortion but I couldn’t bring myself to it. I couldn’t bring myself to abort my baby.

[4:18] Just a few months actually of being pregnant. I fell so much in love with our daughter in my womb. She was only a few months old in my womb and I fell so deeply in love with her.

[4:30] At the same time my boyfriend returned to this hobby that he had. His hobby was research and he was sharing with me what he was researching and what he was discovering and he made reference to the Most High and the Antichrist.

[4:47] So together we ended up doing this deep dive into who is Jesus. We watched movies and videos and read literature. For the first time I realized that Jesus was real, that he was a real person and that he walked the earth.

[5:03] I started feeling this burden that I had never felt before. I felt like I was not clean. I just felt dirty and I felt shameful and I felt so much regret but I knew there was nothing I could do to make myself clean again and pure again.

[5:22] I ended up getting a Bible for our family and I remember bringing it into our home and placing it on my lap and just feeling the weight of it on my lap and thinking that the answers were in it but I opened it up and even though it was in English it was like another language to me. I tried to read it, I didn’t understand, I tried another time, I couldn’t understand and I thought if I want to know what’s in the Bible, I need to go to a church.

[5:55] My boyfriend was away on business for the weekend and I did some research, found a church that was a few blocks from our home, I sent him an email that said “want to try this out?” and I just had the link. So that Sunday arrived.

[6:11] We sat down and I remember looking around at all the people and I was just so surprised that there was so much ethnic and generational diversity and everyone looked so happy and this woman stepped forward and she started praying. I had never heard anyone pray in this way but I remember closing my eyes to participate in the prayer with her and when she was finished she started singing and her voice was so powerful, it was like an angel, she started singing about how God had left the 99 for the one.

[6:49] I just knew that I was the one and then the pastor came up after the music was over which I later learned was worship music, the pastor started preaching on something in a book called First Corinthians which I had never heard of and he was preaching on idolatry and sexual sin. I couldn’t believe that he was speaking to my heart about things that I was having issues with that I was struggling with.

[7:16] Afterwards, he came up to us and it turns out the pastor was Jewish and I thought how is this possible? Here I was a few states away from my parents, a few hundred miles away from them thinking what if my parents saw me, what if they heard me, and I could barely get Jesus, the word Jesus out of my mouth, off of my lips because I was so concerned about what my parents would think.

[7:40] That was March 4th, 2018 and the next day it was very early in the morning, it was still dark outside and I got on my knees with my face to the floor. Nobody had told me to do this, my body just knew to get into this position and I started confessing sin.

[8:00] I went back as early as I could remember to my childhood and confess sin about lying and stealing and cheating, sexual immorality, idolatry, the drugs and drinking and everything I could remember. Once I sat upright, I was still on my knees, I was sitting upright and I knew I was different.

[8:26] I knew something had changed and I knew that Jesus had cleansed me and that I was pure now and I was made new. This supernatural transaction had taken place, God made it possible for me to understand the scriptures at that point.

[8:45] God says in Deuteronomy and in Jeremiah that if we seek Him with all our heart that we will find Him and I found God and He completely changed me. That saved my life and He made me whole. I went through our home, I cleaned out everything that was offensive to God, I went through all my New Age spirituality books, I got rid of them all.

[9:09] Then I decided, I should probably tell my parents and I shared with them that I discovered that Jesus is the Messiah of our people, that Jesus is the Messiah that we’ve been waiting for, they were not as excited about Jesus as I was. Shortly after that, my mom called me and she said, “Don’t you ever talk to us about Jesus again.”

[9:34] My boyfriend ended up getting saved on the same day as I did, it was March 4th, 2018 and we started learning what God expected of us. Previously we thought, well, we love each other, it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks, we have a daughter together and then we realized that we were living in sin, that God actually does have opinions of our relationship and so we ended up getting married as a result and the next year we ended up getting baptized and our lives, we just watched as our lives just blossomed, our relationship blossomed, everything in our life became new and bright and exciting in a holy and spiritual way.

[10:17] We started attending church every Sunday morning, we just longed to go to church, we wanted to be there. It took me a few years but I realized that God had answered those three prayers. I prayed for a stable life and He gave me peace beyond all understanding, a peace that only God can give us which created stability in my life.

[10:39] He gave me a husband that I know we will never separate. I said I wanted to be married and stay married and He gave me work I love and that is to homeschool our daughter and this is nothing like what I imagined. When I prayed for a stable life, when I prayed for a man to marry and when I prayed for work I love, it looked very different from what God gave me but God knows better.

[11:09] God always says that He wants our heart, He wants a personal relationship with us and this is nothing that I had ever been taught because everything that I had experienced as a Jew was what we eat and what we don’t eat, what we do and what we don’t do and it was more about our acts and our behaviors and less about relationship. There’s nothing more Jewish than following the Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures and I have found that Jesus fulfills all of it.

[11:43] So now when I’m reading through my Bible in the Hebrew Scriptures and I read something about Messiah, I always write Jesus’ name next to it because Jesus is the King of Kings, He is the bread of life, He is the living water, He is my Savior and He is your Savior.

[12:09] Amen.